National Gallery (London)

London's National Gallery, houses a rich collection of over 2,300 paintings dating from the mid-13th century to 1900.

Summary Free admission Art and sculpture Guided tours Gift shop Information provided Learning facilities

Food and Drinks Tea Room

Introduction

London's National Gallery, founded in 1824, houses a rich collection of over 2,300 paintings dating from the mid-13th century to 1900 in its home on Trafalgar Square. The collection belongs to the British public and entry to the main collection is free, although there are charges for entry to special exhibitions.

The National Gallery's beginnings were modest; unlike comparable galleries such as the Louvre in Paris or the Museo del Prado in Madrid, it was not formed by nationalising an existing royal or princely art collection. It came into being when the British government bought 36 paintings from the banker John Julius Angerstein in 1824. After that initial purchase the Gallery has been shaped mainly by its early directors, notably Sir Charles Lock Eastlake, and by private donations, which comprise two thirds of the collection. The resulting collection is small compared with the national galleries of continental Europe, but has a high concentration of important works across a broad art-historical scope, from the Early Renaissance to Post-impressionism, with relatively few weak areas.

Open
Daily 10am-6pm
Wednesday 10am-9pm

History to the present day

The unexpected repayment of a war debt by Austria finally moved the hitherto reluctant British government to establish a National Gallery, just as the art collection of John Julius Angerstein, a Russian émigré banker who had died the previous year, appeared on the market. On 2 April 1824, the House of Commons voted to purchase 38 of Angerstein's paintings, including works by Raphael and Hogarth's Marriage à-la-Mode series, for £57,000.

The National Gallery opened to the public on 10 May 1824, housed in Angerstein's former townhouse on No. 100 Pall Mall. It was frequently overcrowded and hot and its diminutive size in comparison with the Louvre in Paris was the cause of national embarrassment. Subsidence in No. 100 caused the Gallery to move briefly to No. 105 Pall Mall, which the novelist Anthony Trollope called a "dingy, dull, narrow house, ill-adapted for the exhibition of the treasures it held". In 1832 construction began on a new building by William Wilkins on the site of the King's Mews in Charing Cross, in an area that had been transformed over the 1820s into Trafalgar Square. The location was a significant one, described by the trustee Sir Robert Peel as being "in the very gangway of London" and thus equally accessible by people of all social classes.

The bequest of 42 paintings given by the chemist Dr Ludwig Mond in 1909 was one of the largest ever received by the gallery and strengthened its holdings in the Italian old masters. During the 19th century the National Gallery contained no works by a contemporary artist, but this situation was belatedly amended by Sir Hugh Lane's bequest of Impressionist paintings in 1917. A fund for the purchase of modern paintings established by Samuel Courtauld in 1924 bought Seurat's Bathers at Asnières and other notable modern works for the nation; in 1934 these transferred to the National Gallery from the Tate.

At the outbreak of World War II the paintings were exiled to safety in various locations in Wales and then to Manod Quarry, near the town of Ffestiniog in North Wales. Originally the director Kenneth Clark hoped to ship the paintings from Wales to Canada, but he received a telegram from Winston Churchill exhorting him to “bury them in caves or in cellars, but not a picture shall leave these islands”. In the meantime the pianist Myra Hess gave daily recitals in the empty building to raise public morale at a time when every concert hall in London was closed. In 1941 a request from an artist to see Rembrandt's Portrait of Margaretha de Geer resulted in the "Picture of the Month" scheme, in which a single painting was removed from Manod and exhibited to the general public in the National Gallery each month.

Arrival information and how to find us

Address: National Gallery, London, , United Kingdom

The National Gallery
Trafalgar Square
London WC2N 5DN